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is this anything

~ a compendium, by Nancy Coughlin

is this anything

Tag Archives: apophenia

managing randomness (a tweet)

11 Thursday May 2017

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apophenia, patternicity, randomness, serendipity

fish-constellation

When we view the night sky we have two basic choices: to be dumbstruck by infinite chaos, or to superimpose a mythology.

 

I feel you now (poem)

07 Friday Oct 2016

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apophenia, grief, illusion, imkertje, loss, love, poem

twins

I feel you now
(aan mijn imkertje)

I prayed you’d let me feel your presence here
as fiercely as I feel your absence. You,
imaginary guru, heard this plea,
condoned my wish. I feel you now, more true

than life, for even as I take my rest
in you, I’m wrested thence. I’m all at once:
so utterly aggrieved, so thickly blessed–
so blinded by your panoramic glance.

storytelling (a quote from Michael Shermer)

28 Tuesday Jun 2016

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apophenia, art, coincidence, imprinting, Michael Shermer, pareidolia, quotation, randomness, stories, The Believing Brain, zen

“Humans are pattern-seeking story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns, whether they exist or not.”
― Michael Shermer

Image

random thought (from a letter)

22 Wednesday Jun 2016

Posted by is this anything in autism, letter, random thought

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apophenia, grief, randomania, randomness, surrender, thinking out loud, transience

turkey and woman

How lucky that I lack the temperament, and perhaps the imagination, ever to ask in hope of reply for the “why” of unknowable things. My faith in randomness, it seems, burns just as bright as other people’s faith in divine order.

lucky (a tweet)

22 Wednesday Jun 2016

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apophenia, luck, randomness, serendipity, tweet

I feel “lucky” only once I realize I’ve been lucky all along. After all, luck’s the sort of thing that has precisely, and only, the meaning I give it.

elephant photobomb

artifact (random thought)

11 Saturday Jun 2016

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apophenia, pareidolia, randomness

The Boot on Earth:
some random planet’s
apophenic artifact.

boot italy apophenia

creativity (a quote from Albert Einstein

30 Monday May 2016

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apophenia, comfort, creativity, grace, happiness, meditation, memory, serendipity, serenity, surrender, thinking out loud, writing, zen

Take-time-to-smell-the-flower-resizecrop--

Creativity is the residue of wasted time. –Albert Einstein

(PS: if this is true, I’m golden.)

With winter nearing, I remember spring (a poem)

23 Monday May 2016

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acceptance, apophenia, death, freedom, grief, love, memory, mom, poem, transience

Flower With Snow 11

With winter nearing

With winter nearing, I remember spring:
A fickle March, before my mother died.
Her bed lay flush with window. Side by side,
We watched another snowfall—wondering

At all the forms a snowflake takes: like bone
Turned ash, like milkweed floss, like feather.
Tonight they fell in tufts that clung together,
But for a few who braved the fall alone.

Heavy, wet, yet floating. It was night,
The storm lit from beneath. (My mother’s room
Was lucky, disconcerting midnight gloom
By posing, drapes pulled wide, above the light

That advertised the doors below, where hearse
And ambulance were meant to go.) We watched
The snow in halogenic awe untouched,
Unbroken now, by dietician, nurse,

Aide, hospice worker, laundress, orderly,
Their squeaking soles no longer restless hounds
That whined and sniffed at daylit doors; their rounds
Unspooled at last. And so we lay there free.

We lay there, clumped and clinging, and we felt
That we might never die, but only melt.

The odd things we love, when we love (a poem)

11 Wednesday May 2016

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apophenia, cats, choice, dogs, illusion, love, marriage, metaphor, poem, surrender, transience, wanda gag

 

dogs

The odd things we love, when we love

Henry cares only for films about humans. Except
when he’s high, when he garners delight and soft
consolation from the documentary adventures

of other mammals. Dogs, in particular, warm his
weary cockles. He loves dogs more than any lover
of dogs I’ve known before, and I don’t mind telling you,

I’ve known my share. If I had nothing else to love
him for (but really there are ninety-seven things,
which I intend to list ad nauseam in future poems–

stay tuned!), I’d love him merely for his earnest
love of dogs.        And yet, if one day he went mad,
and started loving cats (against which I hold nothing,

due to allergy), I’d click my heels and spin around, and
love his love of cats. Because, you know, that’s how
we got here. That’s how it’s worked, so far. Ailuromania*,

to give but one example, becomes just the thing at hand,
the current metaphor: a pin, a peg, a cross, a stake,
a nail–a strong, convenient hook to hang our love on.

millions-of-cats-man2

*ailuromania: a passion for cats

knowing (a tweet)

14 Thursday Apr 2016

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acceptance, apophenia, balance, comfort, freedom, grace, grief, paradox, suffering, thinking out loud, transience, tweet, zen

ants stick

The knowing is beautiful. Thus, the struggle that brought you the knowing–mustn’t that also be beautiful?

glorious (an extended tweet)

14 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by is this anything in Evolving ideas, first principles (revised often), random thought, serendipity, twitter tweets, writing, zen

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apophenia, coincidence, randomness, serendipity, writing, zen

 

Serendipity is a manifold gift from the blue. “Facilitating serendipity”—really just a synonym for “paying attention,” I think–is a glorious practice. It lets us pluck delicious fruit from random orchards.

pi pie coincidence

Apophenia (a poem)

26 Thursday Mar 2015

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apophenia, poem, randomness

 

windy tree

The trees grow restless for the coming storm.
Or do they shake their arms in go-away?
They swoon before the wind’s relentless grace.
Or do they claw at God for waking them?

monkeys (a quote from Robert Wilensky)

04 Wednesday Mar 2015

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apophenia, quotation, randomness, robert wilensky, writing

istock-18586699-monkey-computer
We’ve all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.    ― Robert Wilensky

everything (a quote from Goethe)

27 Friday Feb 2015

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apophenia, both, goethe, illusion, paradox, quotation, serendipity

messy face

Everything is both simpler than we can imagine and more entangled than we can conceive.   –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Confession (a poem)

17 Tuesday Feb 2015

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apophenia, coincidence, miracle, pareidolia, poem, randomness, serendipity

tree dancer

Confession

The miracles that follow me all day
Draw half their breath from my imagination.
E.g., these barren branches, witch-bone gray,
Claw wildly at the wind… Each rock formation
Discloses Lincoln. Clouds find Santa Claus.
And so on: marvels of the merely here.
And once you know them, dark and light, obtuse
And vivid, each way stunning, they appear
All miracle, all–why not?–lucky. (Hint:
Some days you have to tilt your head and squint.)

to fall (quote from Jorge Luis Borges)

21 Sunday Dec 2014

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apophenia, illusion, Jorge Luis Borges, love, quotation, transience

 

bachalpsee-bachse-lake-switzerland

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.  –Jorge Luis Borges

soothing (a tweet)

09 Tuesday Dec 2014

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apophenia, balance, comfort, happiness, illusion, love, randomness, serenity, yin yang, zen

cars road

I like, tonight, just hearing the cars go up and down the hill. I’ve always been a huge fan of the Doppler Effect.

proof (a quote from Mark Strand)

07 Sunday Dec 2014

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apophenia, attention, mark strand, poetry, quotation, writing, zen

Photobombed-by-a-shark-resizecrop--

Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention. –Mark Strand

secret (a quote from C. S. Lewis)

06 Saturday Dec 2014

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apophenia, c. s. lewis, compassion, love, mere christianity, quotation, surrender, zen

compassion

Do not waste time bothering whether you “love” your neighbour; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.  –C. S. Lewis

noteworthy (quote from Alan Watts)

19 Sunday Oct 2014

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alan watts, apophenia, balance, both, illusion, patternicity, zen

Llama-photobombs-the-kiss-scene-resizecrop--

“We ignore all kinds of things because we notice only what we think noteworthy. And therefore our version of everything is highly selective. We pick out certain things and say that’s what’s there, just as we select and notice the figure rather than the background.” –Alan Watts

miracles (thinking out loud)

09 Thursday Oct 2014

Posted by is this anything in journal entry, random thought

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apophenia, illusion, journal, miracle, serendipity, subjectivity, thinking out loud, writing, zen

Journal excerpt from November 11, 2013:

….We seem to think we need “miracles” to support our faith in the eternal. But what we really seem to be asking for are NEW miracles: weird stuff we’ve never seen before, like, I don’t know, the Second Coming, or a talking cow. But how must it have felt, and how it must still feel to every child—oh, what a miracle FIRE must always seem to anyone first discovering it.

hanks2

grok* (journal entry)

22 Monday Sep 2014

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acceptance, apophenia, autism, choice, comfort, family, grief, grokking, Hannah, illusion, journal, loss, love, memory, metaphor, motherhood, quote, robert heinlein, serendipity, slice of life, thinking out loud, zen

 

vintage-packaging-flower-seed-packets-from-thes_icnfe_4

(http://thepackaginginsider.com/vintage-packaging-flower-seed-packets-from-the-1800s/) (lovely!)

Journal entry, August 28, 2014

Cleaning house yesterday, on a forgotten shelf I found a shirt of Hannah’s. A stretchy Goodwill t-shirt, powder blue, with folksy flower-seed-packet art on the front. Minor stains, of course, plus a hole in the back collar where someone (I?) had clumsily lopped off the tag. [Shirt tags made Hannah itch.] I held the shirt to my face and breathed it in like an idiot seeking the flowers. But no, it was just that the shirtfront–and then the shirt’s inside–was the only part that hadn’t been exposed to nine years of dust.

And I believed the shirt still smelled like Hannah, believed that I could know–could grok*–her presence, her self, merely through these greedy inhalations of not-quite-random air. I sat on my bedroom floor and pulled the shirt onto my head (think of a blind bank-robber), and then, to a point far past absurdity and fast approaching asphyxia, I breathed in and out its ineffably Hannah smell. (Must, dust, detergent, every mundane staleness, but something of her there too–something.) I chose to feel myself awash in her essence. As in the many dreams I’d dreamed, hope-caught, throughout her life, I felt free once more to slip beneath the surface of Hannah’s embryonic, oceanic world, and to breathe, however feebly, underwater.

I chose to feel–and to believe–all this on such a primal level that the mind had no clue of the choice till it was made. But with a shrug, quite used by now to the heart’s vagaries, the mind humored us both. I nuzzled for one last deep second against the thread-worn seams that defined the shirt’s armpits. Then I pulled the shirt off and held it awhile. I dusted it, refolded it, and–ah, my darling girl, now what to do? Replace it on the forgotten shelf? Cleave it into rags? Throw it away? I couldn’t, can’t, decide this yet.

Ah yes, but still, how well I know: let go, let go, let go, let go.

——

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok:

*Grok /ˈɡrɒk/ is a word coined by Robert A. Heinlein for his 1961 science-fiction novel, Stranger in a Strange Land, where it is defined as follows:

Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science—and it means as little to us (because of our Earthling assumptions) as color means to a blind man.

reminder: stay surprisable (a tweet)

18 Thursday Sep 2014

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absurdity, apophenia, autism, both, coincidence, happiness, illusion, miracle, paradox, randomness, serendipity, surprise, surrender, zen

If I’m not careful, I’ll waste an absurd amount of time finding only those things I’m already looking for.
giraffe road

pattern thinkers (a quote from Temple Grandin)

06 Saturday Sep 2014

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apophenia, autism, pattern thinking, patternicity, quotation, temple grandin, thinking

I’ve given a great deal of thought to the topic of different ways of thinking. In fact, my pursuit of this topic has led me to propose a new category of thinker in addition to the traditional visual and verbal: pattern thinkers. –Temple Grandinmandala momks

apophenia in writing (random thoughts)

06 Saturday Sep 2014

Posted by is this anything in Evolving ideas, random thought

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apophenia, both, coincidence, comfort, creativity, freedom, helplessness, illusion, memoir, memory, pareidolia, pattern, randomness, surrender, synchronicity, thinking out loud, writing, zen

fish constellation

The art of accident, the accident of art. Serendipity. Synchronicity. Coincidence. Luck. A world in which “success” and “failure” coexist. Where what feels like choice, also feels like surrender. Finding patterns in wallpaper, a piece of toast, the relative positions of stars–how different is this from configuring a unified plot from my life’s for-all-I-know random moments? Writing a memoir (writing anything) is an exercise in what I want to call “the management of apophenia.” Apophenia: the innate human tendency to find patterns in randomness. Michael Shermer, who wrote The Believing Brain, calls it “patternicity.” (Note to self: maybe I should too?)

So, “managing apophenia.” As far as I can gather, it’s the same practice as what I’ve heard other people call “harnessing serendipity.” At any rate, as I write this book I watch myself collate, from what may well have been a haphazard life, only those moments that my apophenic mind has singled out as vital to my “story”–and meanwhile viewing a million other moments as extraneous, as ignorable white noise. And how many events have I forgotten entirely, or never truly experienced as they happened, because they didn’t fit my evolving, concocted self-narrative? What details have I left out of focus, in the blurry background of the photo? (And don’t get me started on all the things that might have happened to me but happened not to happen.)

Without knowing it, I’ve spent my life culling memories, leaving only those that befit my apophenic self-vision. It’s what we all do, I imagine. It’s how we remember and distinguish ourselves as selves instead of hapless, nameless waves in an indifferent ocean. This is how we make “sense” of it all. When we view the night sky we have two basic choices: to be dumbstruck by chaotic infinity, or to superimpose a mythology.

The trick of it all, it seems to me, is to recognize and manage our innate search for patterns. The first step must be to comprehend that the patterns are indeed self-created, and not (necessarily) objectively “real.” But reality, of course, is a bit overrated. Sometimes a useful fiction gets you farther than a useless truth. We were born to invent a world out of random flecks of residue. The trick, now, is to waken to the whole of it, to understand that background and foreground, importance and trivia, failure and success, are objectively meaningless, so you might as well train your eyes to locate patterns that might help you best explain your myth, metaphorize your story.

pareidolia in art (quote from Leonardo da Vinci)

17 Sunday Aug 2014

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accident, apophenia, art, both, coincidence, freedom, illusion, James Lawley, Leonardo da Vinci, metaphor, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, pareidolia, quotation, randomness, serendipity, transience, wabi sabi, writing, zen

[Pareidolia is ‘a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant, a form of apophenia.’]

From wikipedia:  In his notebooks, Leonardo da Vinci wrote of pareidolia as a device for painters:

“If you look at any walls spotted with various stains or with a mixture of different kinds of stones, if you are about to invent some scene you will be able to see in it a resemblance to various different landscapes adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys, and various groups of hills. You will also be able to see divers combats and figures in quick movement, and strange expressions of faces, and outlandish costumes, and an infinite number of things which you can then reduce into separate and well conceived forms.”

pareidolia (1)

 

serendipity (quotations from Nassim Taleb and James Lawley)

15 Friday Aug 2014

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accident, apophenia, balance, black swan, coincidence, grace, James Lawley, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, patternicity, quotation, randomness, serendipity, synchronicity, transience, wabi sabi, zen

“Half the time I hate Black Swans, the other half I love them. I like the randomness that produces the texture of life, the positive accidents, the success of Apelles the painter, the potential gifts you do not have to pay for. Few understand the beauty in the story of Apelles; in fact, most people exercise their error avoidance by repressing the Apelles in them.”

–Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan

“Maximize serendipity: “A strategy of seeking gains by collecting positive accidents from maximising exposure to ‘good Black Swans’.” (p. 307, Taleb)  Taleb calls this an “Apelles-style strategy”. Apelles the Painter was a Greek who, try as he might, could not depict the foam from a horse’s mouth. In irritation he gave up and threw the sponge he used to clean his brush at the picture. Where the sponge hit, it left a beautiful representation of foam.  –James Lawley   (source: http://www.cleanlanguage.co.uk/articles/articles/218/2/Black-Swan-Logic/Page2.html)

serendipity-unexpected

@zerosumr (a tweet)

27 Sunday Jul 2014

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acceptance, apophenia, both, comfort, death, friendship, grace, imkertje, metaphor, miracle, paradox, randomness, surrender, transience, tweet, zen

u know how i know yer Here, mijn schatje? Coz w/ yr death u finally taught me yr ineffable truth: that Here is an infinite place.

laughing buddha

 

 

presence (a quote by Ram Dass)

25 Friday Jul 2014

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apophenia, autism, desire, paradox, quotation, ram dass, randomness, surrender, transience, zen

“As long as you have certain desires about how it ought to be you can’t see how it is.”

—Baba Ram Dass

Llama-photobombs-the-kiss-scene-resizecrop--

blind (an extended tweet)

17 Saturday May 2014

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apophenia, blindness, both, compassion, grace, illusion, kindness, metaphor, randomness, tweet, vision, zen

Clearly we’re all blind. We each “know” just one small part of the elephant. Thus, how absurd to be arguing with such fury when we really ought to be comparing notes.

 Image

mathematics (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)

06 Tuesday May 2014

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apophenia, illusion, math, meditation, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, play, quotation, randomness, zen

“Recall that mathematics is a tool to meditate, not compute.” –Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Image

 

obvious (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)

06 Tuesday May 2014

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apophenia, illusion, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, pareidolia, quotation, randomness, reason, zen

“It is so obvious that we know what to do yet do not carry the action because thinking can be largely ornamental.” –Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Image

a happy, half-learned lesson (a tweet)

15 Tuesday Apr 2014

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apophenia, balance, both, happiness, illusion, play, truth, yin yang, zen

The knowledge that the world is illusory has little to do with how much fun it is to play with.Image

yab yum (a tweet)

11 Tuesday Mar 2014

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apophenia, imkertje, love, memory, metaphor, sex, thinking out loud, tweet, yab yum, zen

Polishing a pipe today,

its shaft blown sleek and stony-smooth,

when words you taught me leap to heart,

and heart leaps headlong into you.

Image

Guy (a found poem)

10 Monday Mar 2014

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apophenia, balance, found poem, Henry, memory, poem, randomness, slice of life

(a found poem: Henry’s description, verbatim, of what he’d just noticed out our window)

Guy

There was a young man crossing Excelsior from
east to west, and he was—first, he was in a
t-shirt and shorts in this weather; then, he was
limping, so that, I don’t know if he had a cast
on his foot or sprained or something, and, then,
he was carrying a large bag of ice. Um, so he’s
obviously going to a party to get drunk. So you
had a whole little story just in watching this guy
cross the street. It’s a story I know well from just
having finished grading their personal narrative
essays in composition, so I really was in that
world, for hours and hours, yesterday.

Image

ephemera (letter excerpt)

07 Friday Mar 2014

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apophenia, balance, coincidence, comfort, ephemera, love, memory, mystery, randomness, transience, writing

Part of a letter I wrote to my friend Will today:

I love ephemera–as much as you do, I think, and for the same kinds of reasons. It’s as if we walk our lives through a heavy, debris-laden wind that leans us forward, bows our heads against its force, so that we can hardly tell where it is we’re finally going. Even so, we keep our eyes squinted open, our fingers poised, ready to grab at whatever fragment of life we might notice flying by, anything viable, readable, anything with a heartbeat, anything that isn’t merely dust. We grab at each little shard of paper or thread or somebody’s tossed-away keepsake. Clutching to contain it, we study it from every angle, view it through each lens, put it through x-ray machines, decoders, translators, machines that test for DNA and carbon-dating. We compare and combine it with our other fragments–our modest collection of worn-out, tattered, wind-stolen things. Finally we catalog and curate our new find, then tuck it away like a kitten beneath our coats to keep it, and us, alive and warm.

We could have been archaeologists, I think. Well, except for the part with the kitten. That doesn’t quite go, I guess… Okay, then: We could have been collectors of lost souls.

Image

Apophenia (random thought) (an extended tweet)

04 Wednesday Dec 2013

Posted by is this anything in Evolving ideas, journal entry, random thought, twitter tweets

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apophenia, coincidence, randomness, thinking out loud, writing, zen

My favorite thing these days:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

It’s vital to the human creation of art, yes?

The fact of randomness (and I may as well posit it as a fact, because I don’t know how to know differently) is the miracle from which we all spring, and the foundation upholding everything we feel, think, do, create. We needn’t even learn–we are born to know how–to take advantage of random events (“coincidences,” with all that word’s various connotations), insofar as we’re able (and willing?) to. Just seconds after our birth, among the otherwise “meaningless” distortions of a suddenly visual, almost certainly terrifying world, our eyes are somehow and irresistibly drawn to the life-saving pattern of our mother’s face. We feel better; with muscles we’ve never used before, we strain to reach her. I think it’s like this: She’s our first “Jesus-in-a-piece-of-toast.” She’s our first “Face on Mars.” (In my own private parlance, she’s the “pirate in the bathroom tile”) Two eyes, one nose, one mouth (and, in the pirate’s case [but probably not the mother’s], an eye-patch and a droopy mustache). That simple visual pattern becomes our first lullabye, our first fable, our primal surrender to the comfort of the arbitrary.

Image

coincidence (Einstein)

04 Wednesday Dec 2013

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apophenia, coincidence, quotation, randomness

“Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.” –Albert Einstein

Image

Link

Apophenia, Pareidolia, Synchronicity, Naivete

10 Sunday Nov 2013

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apophenia, coincidence, da vinci, imkertje, miracle, randomania, randomness, thinking out loud

[3/12/2014: first posted as a ‘journal entry,” but really an excerpt from a letter to mijn imkertje] [thus you see what he had to put up with]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

and also this:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity

I’m just now starting to learn that there are words for these ideas I’ve been grunting my way toward by myself, and often with you, for the past several years.

I’m always the caveman in these scenarios, you know:

chiseling away toward the creation of a primitive wheel. Honing it, correcting it, smoothing it toward ultimate symmetry. Showing it off to a genially diffident tribe who don’t quite get the point, really (the point is that it has no “point,” damn it! it’s a torus!!!) and who, in fact, have begun to distribute the daily mammoth so that I always seem relegated to what I can only guess is “lower intestine.” So, all right then, I get a yearning–ah, hubris, mon amour–a yearning to prove myself, re-invent myself, to show off my fabulous invention to some new tribe who might be smart enough to appreciate its genius. I decide to travel to a land farther away than any of my tribe have ever been to–no, nor even heard of. So I lean my shoulder into my “wheel” (a word that means the same thing as the word my caveman self invented, thank you very much) and I “roll” it (btw, I also invented, or anyway streamlined, the entire concept of “rolling”). I roll it far past the memory of my village, far out into and across the tundra, then up, up, to the top of, say, Mount Stumbly, all alone [or, in the Pixar version, in the company of my sassy pet wolf-dog, Wodo, sassily voiced by Eddie Izzard. A related aside: as dictated by Pixar, I myself am voiced by a feisty Cameron Diaz–which is of course ridiculous, because if the world back then had been such that a woman could, with impunity, stare for long hours at an enigma so subtle it blended in with–nay, became–the scenery— To run her fingers blindly along the fabrics of nature’s pervious facade so as to develop a feel, a taste, for the texture and opacity of each dark veil. To peer–patient, dogged–behind veil upon curtain upon sheet upon veil upon sheet upon–finally!–door. To have the freedom and time to plumb the depths (and widths and heights) of, say, this, this thing right beside us all, this seemingly solid, roundish boulder—well, that would be a world where a girl could relax a bit, I’d say, and I recommentd that Cameron Diaz can keep her shirt on, already, and for once forgo the tedium of acting “feisty” all the time.]  And as I finally approach the top of Mount Stumbly, oh, how proud I feel, how eager to roll my wheel downhill again, roll it like a tide of cavalry toward an astonished, applauding new populace… Yes, yes. But of course–oh my love, I’ll bet you know this story as well as I do–when at last I reach the mountain’s ragged crest and gasp, dumbstruck at the unveil of my longed-for new vista, what is it that I see?

I have my own answer, which I like quite well for my own purposes, but it might not be as interesting or relevant as yours, and, anyway, I don’t want to have any influence over what your caveman sees when you look over the mountain.  This story can have any ending at all–why not?–but the best would probably be the one that helps re-teach you whatever lesson it is you’ve been wanting to re-learn lately.

Meanwhile, my own point of my fable is really just this: that we never–not any of us, ever in time–never really invent the wheel. No, we only discover it, and re-discover it, buried beneath the stone. Or no, no, no—we don’t even have to work that hard. To discover the wheel we have only to imagine the moon.

And my other point–the one I came in here with–is that I need to do a lot more reading/learning. Carl Jung–amazing what I still don’t know about him, even after seeing the movie. 🙂 Arthur Koestler too, I guess: “The Roots of Coincidence.” Many many others, old and new. “The Believing Brain” by Michael Shermer– it’s in my official “wish list” at audible.com. (I’m listening to lectures by Alan Watts right now—fabulous stuff! btnhnt.) [but that’s neither here nor there]

I find, more and more, that this is where my path tends to go–the part of me that is mostly “mind” is heading there, I mean. As for the rest of me–the one who carries wood and chops water, builds fires and tames small animals–she’s feeling very strong these days.

I want to apply these concepts (the links above: apophenia, etc.) towards various ways of managing randomness, making the most (whether through experience, logic, cultivated habit, instinct or whatever else might work) of what we tend to call “luck”. In practical life, of course–for luck is easy to find in practical life. [Case in point: just believing you’re “lucky” makes you lucky. Really, it’s true. Try it, it works: I myself have been lucky all my life. (But then, so has everybody else.)] But most fully I want to explore and  learn to exploit randomness in the context of, say, daily zennish practices, such as the art of kindness, or–the area that seems least “manageable” to me these days–the art of making art:

{from wikipedia:  In his notebooks, Leonardo da Vinci wrote of pareidolia as a device for painters, writing “if you look at any walls spotted with various stains or with a mixture of different kinds of stones, if you are about to invent some scene you will be able to see in it a resemblance to various different landscapes adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys, and various groups of hills. You will also be able to see divers combats and figures in quick movement, and strange expressions of faces, and outlandish costumes, and an infinite number of things which you can then reduce into separate and well conceived forms.”}

In my case, I want to see the roles randomness and planning can play in my writing…..and this time to conduct my experiments in public, for (and, for reasons I don’t fully understand, I can agree to this only with both feet dragging along the ground behind me) an “audience” of some kind. (Who is my audience, anyway, besides just you, love? Perhaps that may be one of those questions that’s a lot less important than I think it is.)

This seems a good place to say good morning to your night, good night to your morning.

Namaste, mijn schatje. lovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelove

P.S. Another word I noticed today and want to learn more about: “randomania”. btnhnt. [But that’s neither here nor there.]

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